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Dillos roll into the sunset after years of being ignored

Cap Metro’s Dillo bus is shown Oct. 2, 2009, making one of its last loops around downtown Austin. Rodolfo Gonzalez / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the American-Statesman on Oct. 5, 2009.

The Dillo, clothed in 1980s hunter green and faux 1890s trolley finery, pulled up to the South Congress Avenue bus stop about 12:30 p.m. last Thursday. A 20-something student-looking guy and I got on.

We had our choice of any wooden bench in the cabin, which, aside from driver Andres Negron, was empty. My new friend, however, got off at Second Street a couple of minutes later. It was not until Negron took his six-minute lunch break at the north end of the route, on North Congress Avenue at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, that I had more company.

Jason Tram, who owns a computer business, decided to jump ahead from the Dillo parked behind us. Tram, it turns out, had never ridden a Dillo in the 16 years he’s lived in Austin and did so only because he heard Capital Metro — looking to save about $3 million — was snuffing the Dillos last Friday after more than 30 years prowling streets in and around downtown.

Negron said business had been a lot like this in the six weeks he’d been driving the route, although occasionally near noon he’d get a small knot of state workers going to lunch. We made a full run and a half back to Riverside Drive, to MLK, then back down Congress without taking on any passengers.

At Fifth, a construction worker in a yellow vest got on. Negron knew him and said the guy operates a construction elevator on the Austonian project, which is where he got off, after a two-block ride, leaving Tram and me again. Then, near Hooters on Barton Springs Road, a moment of promise.

“A passenger!” Negron said gleefully. The guy asked if the Dillo was going on west past South First Street. Uh, no. He got off. Final tally: 75 minutes, about 100 blocks, four passengers, two of them aboard only for novelty or journalistic purpose.

Dead Dillo Rolling.

Officials with the union representing Capital Metro drivers and mechanics, looking at about 10 lost or downgraded jobs, say the Dillos did not die of natural causes. Rather, they say, the Dillos were slowly bled to death by policy changes. Just over a year ago, the agency cut Dillo service from five downtown routes to two, and stopped running it to the Toomey Road and Austin High School area where some downtown workers would park and take the trolleys to work.

Maybe so. But a look back at news coverage of the Dillos, including yellowed clippings from the mid-1980s, shows a checkered history of attempts to puff up perpetually laggard ridership. At least three times, Capital Metro tried weekend night Sixth Street Dillos to lure inebriates. Never worked.

Service in the 1980s was free and frequent. Still the numbers were modest. The strategy that worked some — scooping up those Toomey and high school parkers, and hauling jury pools from the old City Coliseum parking lot — could just as well have used regular buses.

As of Friday at 7 p.m., however, the debate became moot. Dillos, we hardly knew you. Most of us anyway.